Robert Stein (1950)

Robert Stein (1972)

Robert Stein (2000s)

About Me

editor, publisher, media critic and journalism teacher,
is a former Chairman of the American Society of Magazine Editors, and author of “Media Power: Who Is Shaping Your Picture of the World?” Before the war in Iraq, he wrote in The New York Times: “I see a generation gap in the debate over going to war in Iraq. Those of us who fought in World War II know there was no instant or easy glory in being part of 'The Greatest Generation,' just as we knew in the 1990s that stock-market booms don’t last forever.
We don’t have all the answers, but we want to spare our children and grandchildren from being slaughtered by politicians with a video-game mentality."
This is not meant to extol geezer wisdom but suggest that, even in our age of 24/7 hot flashes, something can be said for perspective.
The Web is a wide space for spreading news, but it can also be a deep well of collective memory to help us understand today’s world. In olden days, tribes kept village elders around to remind them with which foot to begin the ritual dance. Start the music.

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Conservative Blessing for Clinton?

Michael Gerson, my favorite Evangelical columnist, writes approvingly today about Hillary Clinton as “the most religious Democrat since Jimmy Carter,” citing “her Methodist upbringing as a formative experience, with its emphasis on ‘preaching and practicing the social gospel.’"

Gerson, alarmed by Rudy Giuliani’s iffy pro-life conversion, may be grasping at ecclesiastic straws here, pointing out that Clinton “participates regularly in small-group Bible studies and is familiar with the works of Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich and Dietrich Bonhoeffer--the theological heroes of mainline Protestantism (and of some stray Evangelicals like myself).”

Sen. Clinton may be surprised to learn how much she has in common with George W. Bush’s favorite speech writer, in light of the fact that she wrote her senior thesis about an non-believing Jewish radical, Saul Alinsky, in what most would consider her “formative” years.

Gerson’s subtext here is clearly a warning to Giuliani to get more fervent with promises to appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v Wade.

Hillary as a darling of the Religious Right? Gerson had better start looking for a needle with a very big eye.